


what came before (this winter)

by orphan_account



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, I only looked it up so I knew how wrong I was getting it, blatant disregard for d&d lore, serious misuse of Missy Higgins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 09:54:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11079183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: There are plenty of legends about soul reapers, and you've heard a lot of them over your time doing the work.





	what came before (this winter)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Set Me On Fire - Missy Higgins.

There are plenty of legends about soul reapers, and you've heard a lot of them over your time doing the work. You've heard gibbering fools promising to restore your lost memories, the story of your past you've apparently left behind. You've had curious idiots speculate about how you died, and whether you can describe it, because it’s well accepted legend that reapers remember every single agonising detail. You've met clever ones, too, who think if they can weasel out the story of how you came to work for the Raven Queen - a process which is shrouded in mystery and near-impossible to divine - that they can make a deal themselves, fend off the finality staring them in the face.

Those last ones are the worst. There's something about seeing death as an opportunity which rankles with you, apparent hypocrisy or no.

The grit of truth is a lot less interesting than the lustre of myth. Occasionally you entertain yourself by considering monotonously outlining the terms and conditions of your employment to the hopeful candidates in extensive and unimaginably dull detail. _Human Resources has all of this information in a database of Employee Relations Advices, if you're not following._ Occasionally you think, darkly but not without humour, about doing as you're asked and describing your own death from start to choking finish, in all its ordinariness. Even more occasionally you think about embroidering the story into the guts-and-glory epic your audience clearly expects.

You've heard it all, by now, and you don't have a problem maintaining professionalism in front of your - clients, but the ones who offer to restore your lost past cut deeper than they truly understand.

You haven't forgotten your past. She doesn't take everything from you. That would render you a shell, not a tool; a person with nothing has no reason to do anything. What she does, naturally, is infinitely subtler and more cruel - she only takes from you the thing that’s most central to your being. The terms of the contract allow you to regain it, of course, but the price is higher than you've a hope of reaching without thousands of years of service behind you.

You can reach for the intensity you knew once existed in you, the sheer unadulterated joy which would come upon you pouring your heart into an instrument and hearing yourself reflected back around you. You can reach for it, but you touch nothing but the void. You slam up against a barrier of cold stone in your mind. Everything is numb and unattainable.

It’s not really possible to avoid it completely. You're sent to collect a soul in a school, a theatre, a conservatory; music's a constant everywhere, and you learned very quickly that there are certain instrumental forms which occur to most sentient beings in some way or another.

Sometimes you think they know. The first time, almost certainly.

_You carved a tear into the room with the self-assuredness which only comes with inexperience and felt yourself halt almost immediately. Your pulse would have been frantically staccato in your ears, if you'd had one. Instead it was just - the rush of something without any feeling pooling in your gut._

_The soul you'd come for, hovering patiently over the corpse slumped over the desk, sheet music scattered carelessly where it had fallen. The instruments ringing the walls. Your (not) heart in your (not) throat as you considered reaching for the piano, until you suddenly discovered that you'd no idea what you’d even do with it, your hands like clumsy blocks of ice, uselessly clutching at the scythe. The absence, with only dull grief in its wake, bruised and aching._

You'd managed, somehow, to get the words out. To explain, to open a rift, to guide the soul to the next plane. But reaching for something you'd always felt, easy as breathing, to find a bitter absence in you, was almost more than you could stand.

From that time on it was a constant, but the parade of souls and other people's grief and accompanying never-ending paperwork blanketed the frozen nothing in your being pretty well. Quashing the part of you which reached automatically for song became instinct after a while, until you’d smoothed the edges of the hollow she’d left and learned to glance your mind away from it. No point in making it harder for yourself.

By now it was nothing but a low, toneless hum. After the first handful of centuries (you think it’s been that long, you don’t really know) you learned to drop the barriers and let the sheer force of absence pull you into a vacuum. Floating there, surrounded by a part of yourself you can’t touch any more, is bizarrely when you feel the most at peace with your choice, and soon enough you figure out that it’s when you’re cloaked in that serenity that you’re at your most effective. She might be cruel but her approach has its benefits.

It’s then, right at the height of your surrender to your circumstances, right when you’ve learned to accept and manipulate your restraints to your advantage, that you’re jolted rudely onto a different course.

\--

“I didn't grow up wanting to be that, of course.”

“Who does?”

“No. I wanted to be a conductor.”

It’s not until much later you realise that the void has shifted.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah so I took a perfectly good song about dealing with creative block and used it very literally to write a miserably serious character study about a guy from a comedy podcast which is the first non-work-or-university-related thing I've written in more than ten years, because that's apparently my life now. Like an onion made of irony. See you in 2027 I guess!


End file.
